


shall we dance

by jasondont (minigami)



Series: a million little battles [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, Post-Episode: s04e22 Revenge, gratuitous use of mando'a
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:09:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26016286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minigami/pseuds/jasondont
Summary: Obi-Wan survives his first fight against Maul and Savage by the skin of his teeth. He knows it won't be the last. He needs to get better, and for some reason he has decided Cody can help him do that.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: a million little battles [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1821466
Comments: 15
Kudos: 208





	shall we dance

**Author's Note:**

> they were going to finally get together in this one but oh well

“Sir?”

Cody looks into the room, confused. Kenobi’s cabin is empty, the lights off, and his bed untouched. His boots are missing, and when he peeks into the private fresher, he finds it empty. It’s been three days, but it still smells of bacta and disinfectant. With a disgruntled frown Cody lets its door slip closed.   
Cody taps his datapad against his right cuisse, the hollow sound too loud in the silent room, and then brushes a hand through his hair. He needs a shower and a change of blacks and then to go to bed, to sleep at least for a couple of hours until they make landfall. He really doesn’t have the time to be chasing down his general down the corridors of the huge Venator. 

He does anyway.

He checks first the infirmary, even though he knows it’s wishful thinking even while he opens the door. It’s mostly empty for once, and when he asks the orderly about the general, the man shrugs, with the careless disregard for protocol and chain of command Cody is sure must be trained into most medics. He then goes to the mess, to the bridge, even to the hangar---it’s more Skywalker’s thing, messing with the fighters when he’s feeling restless, but Kenobi likes poking around when he’s bored or has something on his mind.   
He does not try to call Kenobi on the comm, or through the ship’s comm systems, even though he’s on his right and he could. 

(Maybe the general is not the only one who’s feeling restless.)

  
*

  
Cody finally finds him in one of the training salles, one of the private one’s destined for officer and ARC trooper use. They line a long corridor, deep in the belly of the ship, close to the Venator’s hyperdrive engines, and when Cody exits the turbolift he can feel the vibration through his feet, in the backs of his teeth.  
All of them are empty, their doors open like gaping mouths, except one, close to the end of the corridor. Cody crosses it, his steps echoing against the bare durasteel walls, feeling tired and kind of stupid still holding his datapad, and when he gets to the door he finds it already open, waiting for him. 

“Good night, Commander,” says Kenobi. Cody blinks. The Jedi is shirtless and dripping sweat on the soft green mats of the floor. The wounds that his encounter with Maul and his brother left him with have not yet healed completely, and his torso is green and black, the scars red, angry looking. Cody tears his eyes from his superior’s very naked and very battered body and then crosses his arms, datapad still loosely held in his left hand, already frowning.   
“Commander,” Kenobi starts. He holds his powered down ‘saber in his right hand, but the air inside the room still stinks of hot metal and ozone. He must have been at it for a while. Cody does not let him talk.  
“Please do not make me wake up Hello again, sir,” he says. Kenobi is too pale, and now that he’s stopped, he’s begun to tremble. He mirrors his commander and crosses his arms, ‘saber still held tight.   
“I am fine, Cody,” he says. He doesn’t sound like the man Cody has come to respect, to appreciate as a friend; his tone is petulant, almost childish. “I do not need babysitting.”  
Cody arches his brows. He doesn’t laugh out loud, but he kind of wants to. 

Of course he doesn’t need babysitting; he’s an adult and a Jedi and Cody’s damn superior officer. 

“Who said you needed babysitting, sir?” he asks blandly, his face blank, and then watches, supremely entertained despite himself and the circumstances, while Kenobi tries and fails to control his own. Frustration, humour, pain, exhaustion, a blank kind of rage: all of these emotions pass through Kenobi’s face at great speed; Cody knows the only reason he’s able to even see them is because he knows what to look for.   
That, and because Kenobi was beaten within an inch of his life not a week ago. 

The man shouldn’t be down there, training; he should be sleeping, or better yet, on a medical frigate on his way to his Order’s temple on Coruscant. 

“Cody,” Kenobi opens his mouth and then closes it again without saying anything. He drops his eyes, blinks when a drop of sweat falls from his floppy fringe in one of them. Cody realises he must have been scowling, his own anger and sadness and exhaustion clear on his face, and then it’s his turn to drop his gaze, to look away.   
He’s only armoured from the waist down, his cuirass, helmet and everything else back in his room, and suddenly he wishes for the missing pieces with all his strength. He feels weirdly naked.   
“I was finishing up the new requisition forms, sir,” he says, the words clumsy in his mouth in a way they haven’t been for years. “For the new…”  
“For the shinies,” Kenobi finishes for him.   
They fall quiet again. Cody raises his gaze, fixes it on Kenobi’s face. At least the bruises there are mostly gone. When he arrived, he had a badly broken nose that had needed to be reset twice, two truly spectacular black eyes and a busted lip. His jaw was fractured in two places, and one of his ears had to be partially reconstructed.   
Cody knows all this because he had to be the one to tell first the Jedi Council and then Kenobi’s former Padawan.

With a bit of luck, Skywalker will find Maul sooner rather than later, and Cody trusts him to put the vermin down for once and for all; he hopes he’s there too, if not to shoot the fucker, at least to watch.

“I’m all right, Cody,” Kenobi says suddenly.   
Cody blinks. He must have been projecting. He snorts, disbelieving, and gives up on the pretence. He walks to one of the benches that are mounted next to the walls and drops there with a clatter of plastoid. Kenobi sighs, and he uncrosses his arms, but he doesn’t sit with him.  
“You’re really not, sir,” Cody tells him. The Jedi huffs. He knows Cody’s right, so he doesn’t try to argue with him---he just turns his ‘saber on and turns his back to Cody.   
It’s black and blue, and he’s way too thin, still recovering from the Zygerria clusterfuck, but even then Kenobi’s is a very nice back and Cody is very tired and one of these days the general will catch him looking and he will have to throw himself through an airlock.   
He moves his gaze away, focuses on the weapon’s bright blade. The light hurts his eyes.

“I’m a Jedi, Commander. I’m well enough,” is the man’s only answer. He raises his weapon and starts to move through what Cody recognises as a series of Soresu katas.   
“With all due respect, sir. You are also a human being,” Cody says. Kenobi huffs, disdainful, and keeps on working through the familiar series of motions.

At this point, Cody’s seen him fight enough times, and is a capable enough fighter himself, to realise he’s lacking his usual finesse. His form, usually perfect, is almost sloppy; he’s too tired, too hurt, to move as quickly and gracefully as he’s used to, but he’s trying to anyway, and it’s not working.  
Cody opens his mouth, but for once Kenobi is faster than him.   
“Go to sleep, Commander,” he says, his voice strained. “I am fine.”  
He doesn’t order him back to bed, exactly, but the command is implicit in his tone, if not in his words.   
Cody clenches his jaw and feels the already worn thin thread of his patience snap.

A year ago Cody would have obeyed. He would have swallowed his words and stood up and left the salle and gone to- to sulk and quietly work himself into a wordless rage in his own cupboard-like cabin. But it’s not a year ago, so Cody stands up, lets his datapad drop on the bench, and then steps into Kenobi’s next swing and disarms him with a move that shouldn’t have worked in a fighter of the man’s calibre.   
The ‘saber goes flying, hits a wall in the other side of the room, sputters off and rolls for a few seconds before stopping---for an instant Kenobi just looks at him, face blank and terrifying because of that fact, shoulders heaving. 

Cody lets go of Kenobi’s wrist, but he stays in his space, close enough to smell him, close enough to touch.  
He should be scared. He knows he will be, once he comes to his senses. But he isn’t. He looks at his general, this… infuriating, reckless, too smart for his own good man, and stays where he is, looks him right in the face, the slight difference in height obvious for once.   
And when the Jedi calls his weapon with a flick of a finger, it’s Cody’s hand the one that grabs it from thin air, without even having to look.

The ‘saber hits his palm with a loud smack, and Cody keeps it there for a second, its weight half-familiar. It’s warm, kind of slick with sweat, heavier than it looks. It vibrates slightly; it feels like holding a live wire.   
He glances up from the weapon to meet Kenobi’s eyes ---they always look bluer when he’s tired---, drops the ‘saber in the man’s open palm, picks up his pad from the bench and leaves. 

*

His door chimes half an hour later. He’s sitting at his desk just wearing his blacks, looking at the holodisplay that’s floating in front of him without seeing it. Casualty reports and forms and more forms and intelligence reports. There’s one from Hunter and his boys Cody’s been meaning to look at since earlier that morning; he hasn’t had the time. He should wait until after he’s slept, not now, not as he is---keyed up and anxious and, yes, excited, want and fear and anger and frustration thrumming under his skin.

He’s not going to sleep.

So Cody takes off the rest of his armour, sits down, gives himself another hour before jumping into the fresher and armouring up again, and begins to line up all the work he’s been putting off for the past few days.   
And then someone knocks on his door and he doesn’t need to look, to open it, to know who’ll it be.

Kenobi’s wearing just a thin undershirt, the rest of his voluminous robes held carefully over one arm; Cody registers this fact and then raises his gaze up again, looks him in the face.   
His heartbeat is so loud in his chest he’s sure the other man must be able to hear it.   
“Sir,” he says, his voice distant, polite. “May I help you with something?”  
The Jedi’s mouth thins---he hates it when Cody talks like that; it’s part of the reason why Cody does it. He looks tired, pale, but not angry. Or, at least, not with Cody: Kenobi wears his frustration with himself like an ill-fitting cloak. Cody wonders whether he should invite him inside. It wouldn’t be his first time in his commander’s cabin.   
“I didn’t catch you in bed, did I?”   
“Just working, sir.”  
Kenobi sighs. “May I come in?”  
Cody moves from the entrance soundlessly, his bare feet silent against the room’s cold floor, and Kenobi crosses the threshold and stops just inside. The door swooshes closed at his back.

For a few beats, they just look at each other. Kenobi’s usually expressive face is unreadable. Cody carefully shields his mind, his thoughts and his emotions, and when he feels the air between them warm slightly, he knows he’s done something right. The Jedi probes, subtle and careful, but when he finds Cody’s mind protected, he stops.  
Kenobi’s mouth ticks upwards, the tiny gesture full of bitter humour, and Cody links his hands at his back.  
“Sir?” he asks, and Kenobi sighs again, brushes his free hand through his tousled, sweaty hair.   
“I have a favour to ask from you,” he says.  
Cody blinks. He wasn’t expecting that.  
Kenobi’s smile grows in size, triumphant and slightly smug, not enough to be either obvious or distasteful for most sentients, and Cody’s hit once again with the certainty that he’s come to know this man’s face as well as his own or his brothers’. 

He knuckles his eyes, and then drops on his bunk. He points to his empty chair, and Kenobi sits there gingerly, fastidiously arranging his already wrinkled robes in his lap. Cody blinks away the irrepressible, sudden feeling of- of fondness that appears from nowhere, and then crosses his arms.  
“What kind of favour,” he says, suspiciously, the previous distance forgotten.   
Kenobi grins, tired and bruised and floppy-haired. Suddenly, he looks much, much younger. 

Cody’s stomach does something it isn’t supposed to, and he clenches his jaw.

_Haar’chak._

*

Cody didn’t know there was this much wood in the galaxy.

They are planetside for once, enjoying something nobody dares call leave in case they jinx it, and apparently Kenobi knows someone who knows someone who has lent him a whole training hall for an evening. The place is a huge, square room. The mats are made of some kind of… organic fibre, that Kenobi will later explain is extracted from the entrails of a certain gigantic, aquatic arthropod that lives in the depths of the many lakes that dot Naboo’s surface. It feels strange against Cody's naked feet, weirdly warm. In Kamino, floors were always cold and slick and slightly wet, like the insides of a fresher.  
Kenobi looks small and absolutely non-remarkable against the huge columns that line the big room. The bruises from Maul’s ambush have faded completely, and the ones that he acquired in their last engagement have as well. He looks as healthy as he usually does lately---too pale, too thin, but more or less awake, all bright eyes and whipcord strength.

“Come on, Commander,” he says. His stance is familiar, in that it is similar to some of the opening katas of his ‘saber forms, but Cody hasn’t seen him fight unarmed enough times to be able to predict him.  
“I still don’t think this is a good idea, sir,” Cody says, not for the first time. “I won’t be much of an opponent for you.”  
Kenobi doesn’t answer. He just looks at Cody from his side of the mats, knees bent and hands loosely held at his sides. He’s wearing just his breeches and a thin undershirt, his robes and cloak neatly folded on one of the benches next to the wall, and he looks fast and bendy and difficult to hold down.   
Cody’s wearing just his blacks; his armour is also on the bench. It looks cheap and garish against the dark wood panelling and the sober tapestries that hang from the walls, the white and orange too bright, too new, too dirty.  
The Jedi clicks his tongue, impatient. He bounces on the balls of his feet, and Cody sighs and falls into the hand-to-hand fighting stance he was taught back in Kamino. Similar to Kenobi’s, but lower, more stable, his hands raised. It takes advantage of his weight and body mass and size, and makes him extraordinarily hard to tip over. Not that he thinks that will help him much.

The thing is: Cody knows he’s good. He might be one of the best of the GAR at hand to hand. He’s strong and fast and very well trained, and a stubborn _shabuir_ , and he’s been fighting at Kenobi’s side for almost two years, so by now he knows him well enough to be able to guess if not his exact moves, at least his general approach.  
However, he’s reasonably sure that, even then, there’s no known universe where he’s a real match against Kenobi in a fair fight. Disarming him, all those nights ago? A fluke.

But Kenobi thinks fighting Cody will help him get better, and Cody’s tired of looking at him through the glass of a bacta tank, and so he will let himself be kicked around as many times as it’s necessary.

For a few beats, they just look at each other, completely silent in the borrowed training hall. Cody lets himself breath and wait, his eyes on Kenobi, his joints relaxed.   
Seconds tick by. A minute turns into two. Kenobi smirks, his hair in his eyes and his posture relaxed. Cody breathes, in and out, and returns his smile. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to out-patience him, but he’s determined to try.   
Meanwhile, he lets himself look---he has an excuse now. 

Kenobi moves first; Cody sees him coming.

*

Cody is not Kenobi’s only sparring partner. But he is the only one who isn’t a Jedi.

He likes to believe that means something.

*

The next time Kenobi fights Maul and Savage, he wins.

**Author's Note:**

> cody: i am looking respectfully


End file.
